
Every year the hugely influential trend team at Pantone decide on a key colour, one that reflects leading fashion and style trends, and also one that reflects our current emotional mood.
These colour trends show up in our homes, our cars, our clothes - and our gardens.
For 2025, Pantone has selected a light coffee tone, which they call Mocha Mousse.
The latte shade, in Pantone's words :
"nurtures us with its suggestion of the delectable qualities of chocolate and coffee, answering our desire for comfort, and the indulgence of simple pleasures..."
Mocha Mousse Plants
We won't lie, this is a perfect colour for home interiors, clothing, and cosmetics; and it's an almost impossible colour to incorporate in gardens!
We've unearthed one or two plants that will give you the feeling of Mocha Mousse in your garden - and take a look at last year's colour trend, Peach Fuzz, for more complementary shades.Pantone also suggest a colour palette of complementary dusty sunwashed pastels to accompany Mocha Mouse : stonewashed denim blue, dusty pale pink, soft olive green, and faded violet.This definitely gives you more ways to use the colour in your garden - Mocha Mousse for hard landscaping, paving, fencing, pots; and dusty pastels for plants.For on-trend garden style, plant these Mocha Mousse inspired plants, and you'll be instantly stylish in 2025!
Mocha Mousse : Plant The Look
There are a few favourite garden plants that are made for this colour trend; one of them is Salvia. Most salvias we sell are bright red or sky blue, but these two will give you the cappuccino vibe : Mexican sage, Salvia greggii Pumpkin (top left), and the lemon-scented South African sand sage (top right), Salvia lanceolata.They're both fast-growing and fast to flower, and love a sunny sheltered spot to thrive in.
The unusual west-coast native groundcover banksia, Banksia blechnifolia (bottom right) tucks its mocha-toned flowers into its leaves - easier for ground-dwelling mammals to find them and lap up a tasty nectar treat. This one always sells out when we have it in stock, so maybe Australian Plants Online gardeners are true trendsetters! For a toasty coffee feeling you can't go past grasses: soft, golden, whispering in the breeze.
Dwarf purple fountain grass (bottom left)has seedheads in gentle muted coffee colours, perfect for this trend. If you're concerned about self-seeding, its siblings Pennstripe and Nafray are more pale golden in colour, a more milky coffee, and both are sterile so they won't selfseed.
Native eumundi trees have the most spectacular new leaf colour, sometimes glowing coral, sometimes dusky pink, and often this warm rich copper-coffee. And also surprising, the unexpectedly rich autumn leaf shades of much-loved crepe myrtles; this one is the white-flowered Acoma variety, when it wears its warm autumn coat.
As the branches turn to trunks, so the coffee gets milkier and lighter. A beautiful tree in all seasons.
And in the summer season, keep your eyes open for transformations in tree trunks all over the country. Many trees, eucalypts and their relatives in particular, use the midsummer holiday lull to change clothes, shedding last year's old bark for a fresh smooth new skin for new year - startlingly orange, squeaky-clean white. glossy olive green. These two gums (bottom row) are just a tiny example of what you might find on your next nature walk or garden tour.
They're not just for Christmas! There's a huge variety of decorative gumnuts, from small and intricate to bold and chunky - like these (top left) from the bloodwood gum and flowering gum, (Corymbia). Not every garden has room for a crow's ash or teak oak (Flindersia australis) - they're imposing trees for acreage plots - but if you do have the space, they're hardy and rewarding to plant.
And after they flower, you'll get these textured seedpods (top right), which open into mocha stars, in great demand for craft and floral art projects.
Why not spray some silver and gold and hang them on your Christmas tree?
The subtropical rainforest waratah tree (Alloxylon) is one of the showiest garden trees in full flower, round about midsummer - keep a lookout for the pods that follow in autumn. Big, chunky, like a bunch of ladyfinger bananas, they make great natural ornaments (bottom right). The equally flamboyant-in-flower Illawarra flame tree (Brachychiton acerifolius) has similar pods, darker cocoa-bean in tone. Last, but no means least, native banksia lead the way in Mocha Mousse vibes - whether it's their ever-changing long-lasting flowerheads; or their unique and highly textured seedheads, which (like the flowers) stay on the plants for a long time.
There's a banksia for almost every place in Australia.
The hugely influential trend team at Worth Global style Network has selected for 2025 a deep purple-blue-black tone, which they call Future Dusk.
The navy shade, in their words :
"has a sense of mystery and escapism, and feeds into themes of transition – whether it be moving from dark to light, or dusk to dawn – making it perfect for a period of immense change. [It] manages to feel simultaneously familiar and futuristic."
Future Dusk Plants
The flower it immediately evoked for us is the giant bird of paradise (Strelitzia nicolai) - bold, dramatic, other-worldly; exotically alien and flowering with the most astonishing and unique blue-black birdlike blooms.
Like Mocha Mousse, Future Dusk is a challenging colour to incorporate in gardens, but we've collated and curated our deepest darkest blues to give you the space-age feeling n your garden.
For on-trend garden style, plant these and you'll be instantly stylish in 2025!
Future Dusk : Plant The Look
Spring-flowering bulbs are a surprising source of deepest darkest blue-black flowers. Stunning velvety-petalled bearded irises (top left); astonishingly blue Scilla peruviana (top right, just starting to open); several purple-black varieties of tulip (bottom right); and even purple-black hyacinth (bottom left, photo Leon Brocard). You'll find deepest blue in grape hyacinth (Muscari) and dwarf iris too.All our bulbs are stocked seasonally and you'll find them in the main menu. Spring-flowering bulbs are available in autumn, when it's time to plant them six months ahead of flowering; and our summer-flowering bulbs are available in spring, as these take three months from planting to flowering.
We don't restock these during the season, though we may add additional lines to the range.
They're ideal for container growing, and planting amongst dark-leaved groundcover plants. We've got a range of different varieties to choose from, including (clockwise from top left) : the sterile non-seeding Black Pantha,
the unusually-flowered tall Black Magic (photo Keith & Kasia Moore),
the enthusiastically fast-flowering and generous Ozbreed variety, Buccaneer,
and the deep purple Purple Cloud. Agapanthus stay low and grassy through the year, until late spring-early summer when they start to grow those long straight stems that explode in a firework of flowers.
Here's some other similarly unobtrusive plants that produce surprise spires of blue.
The Future Dusk tone leans towards cool blue rather than warm purple-red, so play that up with plantings of cobalt and ultramarine flowers. There aren't many that occur naturally, but those there are, flower in the most beautiful shades.
We can't conjure up a more intense blue in the floral kingdom than native kangaroo lobelia, the lapis lazuli of Mary's cloak in Medieval iconography. Groundcover diversifolia, is deep purple-blue; taller linearis, top left, startlingly cobalt. Full of flowers and easy to grow in a warm sunny climate, compact and shrubby evolvulus Sapphire Blue (top right) is a mass of flowers from spring to autumn. Surround it with a carpet of vigorous creeping vinca - it grows in sun or shade.New to our range, and not yet well-known here, Brazilian little boy blue, (bottom left) is fast-growing, free-flowering, richly coloured. We have a feeling it will be popular, especially when the flowers are this bright.

 
Native quandong (Elaeocarpus obovatus) and blueberry ash (Eleaocarpus reticulatus) trees develop these space-age navy-blue berries, about the size of a small grape or cherry, following their summer display of white and pink bell flowers.The berries are very popular with birds, from rosellas and pigeons, to satin bowerbirds (aesthetic connoisseurs of blue), and cassowaries.If you don't have room for a small tree, a blueberry bush in a pot will give you blue berries! Not as aqua as the quandong or ash, but with a definite navy hue and strongly aligned with Future Dusk. Reinforce the intensity of this dark palette with a couple of dark leaved plants, both groundcovers - purple-leaved ajuga (bottom right) has startlingly blue flowers in warm months that pop up in spikes clear of the twilight-toned foliage.Darkest of all, true black of deep space, black mondo (Ophiopogon nigrescens), the perfect backdrop for a futuristic garden of mystery.